Start here: scaffold your first crew

LESSONLesson 0 · ~20 min

🎯Goal. Install CrewAI and generate a complete, runnable two-agent project with a single command.

▶ Try this prompt

pip install crewai crewai create crew my_first_crew

Run these in a terminal with Python 3.10+. crewai create crew scaffolds a whole project folder for you — you don't write it from scratch.

1In a terminal, run pip install crewai to install the framework. It's open-source (MIT) and free — there's nothing to sign up for.
2Run crewai create crew my_first_crew. CrewAI generates a project folder with a researcher and a writer agent already defined, plus the config files that wire them together.
3Open the generated .env file and add your LLM API key (CrewAI is model-agnostic — you bring your own key from a provider like OpenAI, Anthropic or a local model).

✓You'll see. A ready-made project folder containing two role-playing agents (a researcher and a writer) and the config that turns them into a crew — generated, not hand-typed.

💳Cost. The CrewAI framework is free and open-source (MIT). You only pay your LLM provider for the tokens the agents use when you run the crew — billed separately by them.

💡Takeaway. CrewAI is code-first but not from-scratch: one command scaffolds a real, owned multi-agent project you can read and run.